technology, internet oddities & other random stuff
Archive for September, 2006
I wish I was my kids age
Sep 22nd
Lets face it, kids toys from the 70’s and 80’s were pretty crap, but here’s a toy I want myself. Tickle Me Elmo has been re-released as Tickle Me Elmo TMX. My daughter’s original Elmo just shook and laughed when you tickled it. This new one rolls around the floor, waves it’s arms and then gets up. I have to get one! It’s guarenteed to be the toy to get this Christmas!
Bluddy ADSL Routers!
Sep 18th
I had a nice little Netgear ADSL wi-fi router that sat on top of a kitchen cabinet and broadcasted a nice stable 3Mb internet connection all over the house. It needed a fancy directional high gain antenna to reach the far corner, but it was cool. It had a firewall, a DynDNS client and pretty green and orange lights. Then yesterday, shortly after it’s first birthday (no surprise there!), the connection went very slow. Worse than dial-up. I assumed it was just somebody other than me soaking up the bandwidth. Just in case it was a router problem, I rebooted it….. Big mistake! More >
Wanker!
Sep 11th
I took the kids to the local McDonalds over the weekend because we got home late, and I just needed to get them fed and put to bed. The place was virtually empty, so imagine my annoyance when this knuckle dragger pulled in…. There was an entire car park to abandon his banged up truck, and he chooses to abandon it in the disabled parking space. If you look at the picture, you can see that not content with taking up one spot, he’s parked across both of them. It almost makes me wish he had to get around in More >
Annoyance of the day
Sep 5th
Today I bought and installed Norton Antivirus 2006 for a PC at home. My old AV subscription had expired, and upgrading to the new(-ish) shiny 2006 version was only slightly more expensive. It took 3 reboots to install! There was one between installation and activation, and two more after runs of the LiveUpdate function. Why can’t it download everything at once? Why does it need a reboot just so it can go and download more updates?
And why in God’s name does it insist in popping up a “you must reboot your PC to complete the process” dialog box that you can’t More >
India Picture post
Sep 4th
I was sent to Hyderabad in India on ‘04 to train some call centre staff and I forgot to take my camera, so I had to rely on my camera phone. This time it was a Nokia 6600 that could only snap 640×480, so the pictures aren’t the best. I passed through Dubai on the way there, so I got picures of the Irish pub (isn’t there one everywhere?) and the prizes for their sports car draw.
The little Auto-Rikshaws are a scream, but it’s no fun when you’re stuck in traffic beside a geriatric bus belching exhaust fumes in your face. The heat More >
